


Undying Embers

by Untherius



Category: Firestarter - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 23:37:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9042752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Untherius/pseuds/Untherius
Summary: While on the run, yet again, the end of the world as she knows it finally gives Charlie an opportunity to finally stop running.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



Charlene McGee levered herself upright, the light nylon of her sleeping bag settling around her ankles, and stretched. She shucked out of her long underwear, the chilly air of a desert dawn pricking at her skin.

She quickly checked for the usual uninvited guests—fence lizards, scorpions, snakes—before commencing with her morning yoga routine. Halfway into her third position, the expected moan floated over from three yards away.

“Char,” said the woman she knew only as Granola, “you're nuts. You know that?”

“Mm-hm,” Charlie replied.

She'd been hiking with Granola ever since they'd met in the Laguna Mountains at the forty-mile point, three days into her hike. They'd just reached the two-hundred-mile point at the end of two weeks. And every morning, Granola had made some remark about Charlie's morning yoga.

Although truth be told, it had more to do with the ungodly hour of it, as Granola had put it. Her brother Skunk was even worse. Ever since the ascent from Idyllwild up Devils Slide two days before, Charlie had begun to seriously question how much longer they could hike together without driving each other crazy.

She'd been mentally prepared for that sort of thing. It happened all the time. Hikers joined up, hiked together for a time, then split up again for various reasons. And diurnal preference happened to be one of the more common ones.

Which was really too bad, because Charlie rather liked Granola. She felt like a sister she'd never had.

Skunk grunted from the other side of Granola.

“Guys,” said Charlie evenly, “we have got to make better use of our mornings. We...”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Granola interrupted. “An earlier hike means a lot more mountain snow, which slows us down, which means every daylight minute counts. And in the deserts, we want to make the most of the morning coolness. You've only said it every day.”

“And yet,” said Charlie, shifting into Warrior Pose, “you still say I'm nuts.”

“You're doing yoga during a through-hike,” grumbled Skunk.

“It's important,” said Charlie. “It helps me stay mentally centered.” And, she added to herself, helps me avoid accidentally torching things.

“Well,” said Granola, rising from her own sleeping bag, “I could at least use a stretch. That was a crusher of a descent yesterday.”

“Yeah,” said Skunk. “My knees are still feeling that. It'll be good to have some gentle terrain for a change.”

Charlie chuckled, then moved to her overhead stretch on the ground. “I'm with you on that,” she said. The descent from Fuller Ridge, six thousand feet over sixteen miles, was one of the most notorious along the entire Pacific Crest Trail.

After that, they each went about their respective camp-breaking routines. Granola set some powdered milk, whey protein, and granola to soak in a bowl filled with cold water from the faucet across the trail. Skunk gnawed on a pemmican bar. Charlie chewed one of her own trail bars, a few dark-chocolate-covered coffee beans waiting in a zipper bag. Ten minutes and a fresh liter of water later, they set off again.

Charlie took point as they loped off down the road. After a short while, they dove off the pavement and across the desert floor. Early wildflowers painted the tawny soil in yellow, blue, red, orange, and purple. Cacti opened improbably large satin-petaled cups in lemon yellows and glaring pinks to the rising sun. Rapidly warming air stirred lizards and snakes.

Charlie managed a genuine smile. There had always been something brutally honest about the outdoors. Nature never pretended to be something it wasn't. Its demands were basic and often unyielding. It rarely made promises it didn't keep. And that was what she loved about it. Nature never lied. At least, not when one understood its language.

A line of widely-spaced posts marked the trail route across seasonally shifting sand through a corridor of cactus, yucca, and creosote scrub.

“Uh, guys?” said Skunk. “Do you notice anything odd about the freeway?”

Charlie cast a glance in that direction. Still a couple of miles off, the roadbed was not visible. But some of the vehicles on it were. And they were all stopped.

“Maybe it's a traffic jam,” said Granola. “Or road work.”

“Both ways?” said Skunk. “And way out here? Hey, you don't think it's related to that flu everyone was talking about back in Idyllwild, do you?”

Granola shuddered. “Don't remind me.”

“Gave me the willies,” said Charlie.

“They didn't really show anything, though,” said Skunk.

“Ayup. That's what gives me the willies. It's always what they don't tell you that gets you into the most trouble.”

“That's kind of cryptic.”

Charlie attempted a shrug, her pack almost totally dampening the effect. “Maybe. But it's true.”

A half hour later, they came to a halt a dozen yards from the tunnel where the trail passed under the railroad and Interstate-10.

“Now do you notice anything odd?” said Skunk.

“Such as?” said Granola.

“It's quiet,” Skunk said softly. “We're right next to a major Interstate freeway and it's quiet.”

“So all the stopped vehicles aren't because of road construction or an accident?”

“I doubt it. No engines. No voices. Nothing.”

“I have a really bad feeling about this,” said Charlie

“Let me guess,” said Granola, “we'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, so we must be cautious?”

“Something like that.”

“Now you're starting to worry me, Char.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” That was somewhat of an understatement. She'd reached out with her mind shortly after they'd first spotted the stopped vehicles. Something had seemed off, even then.

What she'd felt had only deepened her concern. Almost everything sitting on the roadway came back to her as ambient, or only a little above that. Which meant that all of it had been sitting there, inactive, long enough for all the  
heat to equalize. Years of experience told her that the last engine had stopped at least twenty-four hours before. That did not bode well.

A couple of yards into the underpass tunnel brought them to a cooler. Skunk opened it. “Well,” he said, “there's still stuff in here. So that's good, right?” He pulled out a PBR for himself, then handed a root beer to Granola. “And for you?” he asked Charlie.

“Is there juice?” she asked.

He looked back into the cooler, then rummaged a bit. “Doesn't look like it.”

Charlie grunted. “Ziggy's place is just up there anyway.”

“You sure?”

Charlie exhaled. “We've discussed this. Alcohol makes me off, and you wouldn't like me when I'm off. I'll be fine.”

A few minutes later, Granola and Skunk dropped empty cans into a weighted cardboard box already holding several others.

They re-emerged into the sun on the north side of the freeway and climbed up to the shoulder of Tamarack Road. They looked one way, and then the other. A couple of vehicles sat on the road's shoulders. Papers stirred in the wind. Nothing else moved.

Granola let out a low whistle. “It's like...Mad Max.”

“Or something.”

Charlie looked westward. “This is really giving me the willies.”

“Yeah,” said Granola pensively. “Me, too. We should get going.”

They crossed the cracked asphalt and followed the trail slightly upslope and alongside a wash that drained under the highway. As the trail led away from the wash, the grade climbed a little, affording a view over what passed for the town of Whitewater. It was hardly a thriving metropolis, but still. Charlie had seen the place on GoogleMaps, and the gravel streets and only partially-filled-in parcels reminded her of real-life SimCity.

Toward the middle of town, near the freeway's access, sunlight twinkled off the glass and metal of several vehicles clumped up at that intersection. Only the blades of the towering windmills south of the freeway moved.

“You might be right,” said Charlie. “About this being like Mad Max, I mean.”

“Where the hell is everyone?” Skunk asked.

“Down with this flu, maybe,” said Charlie.

“Or just indoors,” said Granola. “I can't imagine this place being popular for tourists.”

“Or anyone else,” said Skunk. “Who'd want to live here?”

Minutes later, the trail curved around to cross Boulder Drive. They turned southeast, crunching on the crushed gravel surface. Below them, a large water tank occupied almost an entire lot and next door to it, the home of local trail angels Ziggy and the Bear. A de-facto access trail led from the road across a vacant lot to a white six-foot fence.

Charlie tucked her trekking poles under her arm and followed a worn path along the fence, coming out at the front of the property. A gate was set in the fence and a broad graveled area ended at a concrete driveway.

Beyond the driveway, a lone person stood motionless in the middle of Rockview Drive. She seemed oblivious to the wisps of black hair whipping about her face. Her skirt flapped lazily in the breeze as she stared unblinkingly at the desert.

Charlie noticed two other odd things about the woman. Her temperature was only slightly above ambient, which, for the time of day, was still at least half-a-dozen degrees below normal human body temperature. Her body was also substantially warmer sunward, much more than it should have been. Aside from some minor lower brain function, the woman's thermal profile almost precisely matched that of a road-killed deer.

“Hey,” called Granola, “are you okay?”

The woman slowly turned her head toward Granola, then opened her mouth and moaned. Charlie had heard some fairly horrid and creepy sounds in her life. Nails on a chalkboard. A bobcat in heat. The abrupt screech-and-shatter of a bad traffic accident. Winter wind moaning through bare tree branches in the wilds of Minnesota. Howling wolves on a clear summer night in Fairbanks. That stupid yapper dog next door in Duluth. The screams of the dying people she'd burned alive at The Shop. The sound emanating from the woman's throat eclipsed them all. Charlie felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up on end, even through the sweat and dust caking her skin.

“Gran?” said Charlie.

“Yeah?”

“I have a...”

“...very bad feeling about this,” Granola finished.

Several other people tottered into view from where they'd apparently been lurking behind vehicles, the house across Cottonwood Road, and large clumps of creosote brush. Two men, a woman, two other hikers, and three children. All wore the same vacant expression, bore a visible wound somewhere on their bodies, and had dark stains somewhere on their clothing. One of the hikers was missing an arm, dark stains on a shirt suggesting that the arm had been forcibly and cruelly severed. Worst of all, each one lent their own moaning to the first woman's.

The first woman lurched up the driveway, the click of her tasteful black leather pumps barely audible above the horrible moaning.

“What's wrong with them?” Skunk asked. “Are they on drugs?”

“Beats me,” said Granola.

The woman continued to close the distance, the others tottering behind her on uncertain footing over uneven ground, stumbling over the sparse vegetation, oblivious to stiff twigs and thorns ripping at their ankles and shins. At less than two yards, the woman stretched her arms toward Skunk and lunged.

The dreams Charlie had been experiencing for the last week began to make sense. She'd long ago learned to tell the difference between her three types of dreams. One consisted of collections of memories, sometimes spliced together in ways that seldom bore much resemblance to her waking memories. Another was just what most psychologists considered to be the mind trying to make sense of things. Her third were her premonition dreams. Each had a completely different feel to it.

Sometimes a premonition never happened, at least not in a recognizable way. Some of those dreams she'd come to know as ones of things that might happen were she to continue on her present course. And so occasionally, Charlie could change the future, in a manner of speaking.

The premonitional dream she'd been having came in flashes, a series of stills. Always, they showed people with their mouths wide open and vacant expressions on their faces. She'd concluded that she was going to wind up at some drunken rave party at a casino in South Lake Tahoe.

Which, each time she'd thought about it, had seemed preposterous, since she avoided crowds like the plague. Crowds—or lack of such—had a lot to do with why she'd decided the hike the Pacific Crest Trail in the first place, and why she'd started a full two weeks early. That, and waiting for the University of Alaska to get around to evaluating her Master's thesis on thermodynamics.

Now, as the woman grabbed Skunk's outstretched arm and bit down hard on it, Charlie knew her dreams had been about these people. People who were clearly dead, yet somehow inexplicably still alive. People reduced to the one universal drive common to all forms of life: feed.

Skunk cried out in pain and surprise.

“ _NO!_ ” Granola shrieked. She stepped forward and shoved at the woman.

The woman lurched backward, tearing a chunk of flesh from Skunk's arm as she went, and fell flat on her back. After a moment, she sat up, chewing the piece of Skunk's arm, and climbed back to her feet.

By then, two of the others had stepped onto the driveway, moaning as they came.

Charlie tuned out Skunk's cries and Granola's panic. She reached out with her mind and pushed. It didn't take much. The woman burst into flame, but kept coming. Charlie nudged a little more, forcing the fire inward, through skin and into flesh. The woman abruptly stopped moaning and collapsed, most of the flame dying off to only what would support combustion.

“Well, that sucks,” said Charlie. “She had good taste in shoes.”

“She tried to eat my brother,” Granola shrieked, “and you're talking about _shoes?!_ ”

Charlie shrugged. “It's the little things.” She reached out with her mind again and repeated the process with the man and hiker on the driveway. As before, both collapsed into charred, sizzling lumps.

“We shouldn't stay out here,” said Charlie.

“Really, you think?” Granola spat back.

Charlie spun about and stalked over to the gate. Like most fence gates, it swung inward. She pushed with her hand. Just as she thought, it was latched on the inside. She shrugged out of her pack, grabbed the top of the fence, pulled herself up, and shimmied over, dropping down to crushed gravel on the inside. She opened the latch, swinging the gate wide.

Granola and Skunk wasted no time dashing through the open gate. Charlie grabbed her pack and poles, pulling them in after her and shutting the gate once more.

Inside, a couple of picnic tables sat near the fence. A small tree grew near the rear corner of the house. They made for the tree's scant shade.

Charlie reached out with her mind, probing everything in sight, then for threats still out of sight.

“Dritt,” said a male voice from above.

All three stopped and looked up. A young man knelt on the roof near the back of the house.

“Someone came in here? I am impressed.”

“Can you get down here and help him?” Granola demanded.

“But the others...” the man began.

“If you know what's going on,” said Charlie, “we need to know, too. So get your ass down here.”

The man exhaled heavily, then walked to the low point on what appeared to be a lean-to addition to the back of the house, and dropped down from the corner. The trio met him there.

He took one look at Skunk, then held both Granola's and Charlie's gazes for several uncomfortable moments. “This way,” he said.

He led them into the lean-to. Inside, chairs and folding tables stretched out like a mess area. Against one wall, a stack of boxes reached toward the ceiling. Charlie recognized them as hiker boxes from a similar stack she'd seen when she'd resupplied at Warner Springs.

Granola helped Skunk out of his pack before shrugging out of her own. Skunk sank down onto the nearest chair, cradling his wounded arm. “I'll get some water,” she said, and started for the back door.

A thump from inside the door and a shriek from Granola caught Charlie's attention.

On the other side of a glass-paned sliding door, an elderly man stood, trying to paw his way through the glass, that horrible moan clearly audible through the glass. Moments later, an elderly woman joined him.

“Ziggy and the Bear,” said the man. “Or, what is left of them. Why do you think I was on the roof?”

* * *

An hour later, Charlie stood in the scorching early afternoon sun in their hosts' back yard. The still-smoldering remains of Ziggy and the Bear lay two yards away, reduced mostly to their unburnable mineral components. In the previous hour, she had learned several things.

The man they'd encountered was Leif Eriksson, a Doctoral candidate from Norway studying paleontology in the United States. Which explained why Charlie had recognized his accent from her years in Minnesota. He'd begun his own PCT through-hike three days before she had, mainly because he needed to finish before his student visa expired.

As she'd suspected, what little they'd shown on the news feed in Idyllwild had been severely edited. So much so, that even by the time she'd seen it, the news had been old. The first reports in Los Angeles had occurred the day Charlie had stood gazing at the Southern Terminus monument. In the two weeks it had taken her, Granola, and Skunk to reach San Gorgonio Pass, the Contagion, as most people seemed to call it, had spread exponentially.

Most people infected had tried to go on with their lives. Which meant slapping disinfectants and bandages on bite wounds, intending to deal with it when they'd finished their freight runs, or returned to wherever home was, or if it started to become infected, or whatever other reasons people tended to concoct whenever they wanted to avoid something. That, in turn, had put them on the road when they'd finally succumbed to the illness.

When one driver or another had passed out at the wheel, snarling the freeway, the entire town had turned out to take people off the road and put them up for as long as it took to make further arrangements. Only those had never been made.

A couple dozen of those people had been infected, as had scores of those left for dead out on the highway. Reports, and Leif's own observations, had always been the same. The infected developed flu-like symptoms, then died within twelve hours. Between one and two hours after that, they reanimated and proceeded to attack the nearest living person, trying, and sometimes succeeding, in eating them alive. Worse, the fatality rate was one hundred percent.

When they'd heard that part of the news, Skunk had rattled off a string of obscenities that would have put a sailor to shame, Granola had sunk onto a chair sobbing, and Charlie had taken a shower.

She knew she'd probably looked like an ice bitch queen of the universe. But the whole thing had made her skin crawl so violently, she'd had little choice but to try to wash it off along with a week's worth of trail grunge. The shower had made her feel worlds better. But she still couldn't shake the feeling that the whole world was about to come crashing down around its own ears.

So she stood outside, wrapped in a large bath towel, thin flip-flops on her feet, gazing northward, the call of the trail still loud in her mind, pondering her next move. She could run, of course. She was very good at it. So good, that it had taken her eight years just to complete her high school education, and that in five different places, always under a different name. Never mind that she often felt that she'd learned far more outside of a classroom than inside it.

“Conceal, don't feel,” she breathed. A memory of her father materialized in her mind's eye, him kneeling in front of her, holding her small hands with his large ones, teaching her a mantra he'd hoped would help her control her rapidly-grown abilities: Conceal it, don't feel it, don't let it show. “Conceal, don't feel. Conceal, don't...”

“Conceal what?” asked Leif from behind her.

She nearly jumped. “Don't do that,” she said. “Sneak up on me, I mean,” she added.

“Sorry,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. “But that does not answer the question.”

At first, she said nothing. Then, “It's complicated.”

“Mm-hm. And the burning?”

She craned her head around to look at him, and raked a tendril of still-damp blonde hair away from her eye.

“You asked for gasoline,” he said. “You did not use it.”

“You said you were going back inside.” She'd known he had, of course.

“The door is glass, you know,” he said.

She eyed him, his ice-blue eyes boring back into her own. “That's complicated, too,” she said.

“Of that I have no doubt,” he said. “Do you still plan to keep hiking?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It's not like I have much else to do. And you?”

“I think I will come with you.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. She'd expected to part ways with Granola and Skunk here at Ziggy and the Bear's place, hiking alone for a while. Of course, she'd acknowledged the possibility that she might set out with someone else. But with the hiking season still so early, she'd expected to be the first to arrive, well, pretty much everywhere.

“It is too dangerous here.”

“We agree on that much,” she said. She returned her attention to the mountains, and the building thunderstorm over them. “I'd better get going. You, too, if you're determined to join me.”

“What about Granola?” he asked.

Charlie squeezed her eyes shut. The other woman didn't have many options. She wasn't likely to leave her brother behind to die and then come back as one of those things. But as much as they'd been getting on each other's nerves concerning mornings, Charlie didn't relish the idea of just leaving Granola behind to deal with it on her own. And she sure as hell wasn't going to spend even one night in this house, surrounded by growing numbers of the undead. If she were to meet them, she'd do it on her terms, out in the open on her own two feet, ice axe in one hand, phenomenal psychic powers in the other.

“She'll have to make her own decision,” Charlie said. She turned around and walked back toward the house. She rummaged through the hiker boxes, finding hers near the bottom of one stack. She set it on the table, then went to retrieve her food bag.

“Rainbow Cyphers?” said Leif. “Your name is Rainbow Cyphers?”

“So?” said Charlie.

The sliding glass door opened and Granola tottered out. She blinked red, puffy eyes at Charlie and Leif. She blew her nose on a tissue, and cleared her throat. “He's resting,” she said, voice a little hoarse.

“Maybe you should shower,” said Leif, “while Rainbow here unpacks her resupply.”

Granola gaped slightly. “Your name isn't Rainbow,” she said. “Is it?”

Charlie sighed, then rummaged in her hip pouch and produced her forged Alaska driver's license. The other two peered at it. “My parents were hippies,” she said.

Which was true, one of the few personal details of her real past she ever shared with anyone.

When they were finished looking, she put it back, not quite alongside her forged identification from several other states and Canada.

* * *

Two more hours and a couple of loads of laundry later, Charlie, Granola, and Leif stood at the intersection of Boulder Drive and the PCT, looking back at the inferno that had once been the home of Ziggy and the Bear. Leif had insisted they stack all the hiker boxes near the fence on the theory that someone was still likely to be counting on their resupply to survive not only their hike, but also the end of the world as they all knew it.

They'd sorted out a few boxes belonging to hikers they knew to be dead. Charlie had looted those, despite protests from her companions. They had shut up when she'd pointed to her pack. “You want to know what I own?” she'd said impatiently. “You're looking at it.” She hadn't been exaggerating.

Charlie and Leif allowed Granola a few more minutes to say one last good-bye to her brother.

“You did the right thing,” said Charlie.

“Shut up,” Granola breathed.

Charlie couldn't blame her. She'd convinced her to essentially murder her own brother to spare him the horror of turning into one of the undead. Charlie wanted to tell her that she'd been there, that she knew what it was like to kill another human being, to have a part of her soul shaved off each time. But she'd shoved her past to the back of her mind, as she'd done countless times since the day her father had died.

“We should go now,” said Leif. “If that does not set the brush on fire, I will be surprised.”

One by one, they turned away and trudged off up the trail.

* * *

They spent that night at the Whitewater Preserve, rolling in silently under the waning light of sunset. Two dozen people were already there, one of whom was infected from a bite to the ankle. Another had contracted the contagion, as near as anyone could tell, through an open cut in his hand when he'd tried to administer first-aid to one of the infected just before that person had died.

Charlie let Leif talk to those people about his observations and about what Granola had done that afternoon, while she herself reconnoitered the site. She'd found no further signs of the undead. She didn't expect that to last, not forever.

Several hours later found her doing yoga on a picnic table. Across the small pond that had once been part of a trout farm before it had closed and been turned over to the Wildlands Conservancy, a cliff of grey rock rose up gleaming in the moonlight.

She looked up at the sound of footsteps. “Couldn't sleep either, I take it,” she said.

Granola shook her head. “Are you kidding?”

“You will. Eventually. You'll go hard for a couple of days, maybe three, then drop from exhaustion. Trust me, I've seen it.” Never mind that she'd actually done it herself, more times than she could remember.

“Will they come, do you think?”

Charlie figured Granola meant the undead.

“It's five miles out to the freeway along Whitewater Canyon Road. There's nothing between here and there to draw them. No bread crumbs.”

What she'd just said about the undead would be just as true of the government. Even if someone from The Shop, or whatever had replaced it, were right there in Whitewater, anyone with the resources to pursue Charlie had far too much else on their hands, and probably would for quite some time.

She wasn't sure how she felt about that. Most of her life, she'd been running. First from Rainbird, then The Shop and its assumed successor, and eventually from her past. And now? She could, and would, run from the undead. And after that? She'd been running for so long, it was the only way she knew how to live.

“Molly,” said Granola.

“Mmm?”

“That's my name. Molly Malone. Just thought you should know.”

Charlie smiled thinly. “Molly, we're going to have to move out at dawn.”

Molly groaned. “At dawn? Rainbow, these people can't...” She turned away, gazing across the water.

“I don't say can't,” said Charlie. “Saying can't will get you killed.”

“Yeah. Got that. I'm a through-hiker, remember?”

Charlie shrugged. “Just sayin'.”

“And I'm just saying that any of those people who come with us will need food, water, and gear. Some of them have some of it.”

“They're going to need those things if they stay here, too.” Charlie took a deep breath, held it, then let it back out. “Okay, we can give them all until mid-morning to figure it out. Then I'm hitting the trail. Anyone who wants to, can come with me. They're going to have to keep up and put up, or shut up. And in return...I'll protect them.”

“Protect them? How? With what?”

“I have my ways.”

“What, karate?”

Charlie chuckled ruefully. “That's cute.”

“Karate is cute?”

“Molly, to me, a SEAL team is cute.”

“Wh...what kind of woman are you?”

Charlie dismounted the bench and rested a hand on Molly's shoulder. “The kind who's your best chance for surviving this...apocalypse.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Charlie held Molly's gaze for a time. “Charlene,” she said at length.

“What?”

“Charlene Roberta McGee. Thought you should know.”

It was the first time she'd mentioned her real name since she'd been nine. The names she'd used over the years had always been her first line of camouflage. But she also knew from experience that if Molly was ever going to cope with her brother's death, it would go much easier if she didn't have to do it alone. And Charlie's standoff-ishness was not going to help.

“So, Rainbow,” said Molly, “that's, what, your witness protection identity?”

“Something like that.”

“How many of them do you have?”

“As many as I need.”

“How do I know that's your real name anyway?”

Charlie shrugged. “You don't. Does it really matter?”

Molly chuckled. “I don't know. Interesting coincidence, though. Your trail name being so close to your real name.”

Charlie giggled, something she rarely did. “Yeah. Who knew that an unfortunate incident with a marshmallow would be so telling eh?”

Molly smiled.

“Come on,” said Charlie, “we should probably go bug Leif.”

* * *

Charlie looked out over her ranch lands, Mt. Shasta rising up in the middle distance. A patchy autumn mist hung over the expansive meadow-lands that stretched from the low ridge to the southeast across Hwy. 89 to the Bartle Mountains to the west.

She smiled, and sipped at her chicory coffee. She couldn't complain. Not really. Sure, none of it had gone according to plan, beginning with the tag-alongs she'd acquired nearly a decade before during what had started as a Pacific Crest Trail through-hike. But those changes had been positive ones, even if they hadn't seemed so at the time.

People from Whitewater, and later points north, had followed her initially for no other reason than that she was decisive. Only after several weeks of trial and tribulation had she begun to earn their respect, and for that she'd gone through fire herself.

She still didn't know why those who'd become her closest friends had chosen to love her in the first place. She'd been stand-off-ish, to put it mildly. Even her husband Leif could only best explain it as having seen through the chinks in her carefully-constructed armor and had liked what he'd seen in those glimpses. And so he'd made it his mission to pry her open and release her.

She'd resisted, of course. Even tried to push them all away, hurling venom indiscriminately in all directions like a raging volcano. And there, in the shadow of Mt. Whitney, she'd finally collapsed in on herself like a caldera. She'd expected to be abandoned right then and there. So it had shocked her to find that, through her veil of tears, her friends surrounding her, hugging her tightly, seemingly oblivious to the blazing Jeffrey pine she'd ignited a dozen yards away. In that moment, she had surrendered, and they had become family. That was the moment she'd finally stopped running from the world and started running toward it.

Weeks later, overlooking the rim of Lake Tahoe, the scorched remains of South Lake Tahoe visible across the water and the haze of still-raging Great Basin fires ignited by Reno, Leif had asked her to marry him. Orphan, thief, and murderer that she was, she hadn't felt worthy. She'd said yes anyway and had never looked back.

With all the chaos, the hike had finally become unsustainable and their little clan had taken over a ranch after its owners had succumbed to the Contagion. That had been nearly a decade ago. 

Now she looked out upon the ranch house grounds. The carefully-tended vegetable garden from which they were still squeezing the last of the season's solanums and cucurbits in some beds and letting root veggies hunker down in others. The pine-trunk palisade wall they'd barely completed before the first winter. The basalt curtain wall they'd built out of stacked blocks that she'd then personally fused together. Two small ponds that froze over each winter, yet still managed to support enough fish for the occasional change in menu.

Leif stepped up behind her and nuzzled her hair. “God morgen, beautiful,” he said.

“Mmm,” she said, leaning against him. “God morgen yourself.”

Their son Andrew, turned seven over the summer, padded by. “Morgen, Mamma, Pappa,” he said.

“Morgen, squirt,” she said to him.

“I'm not a squirt!” he protested on his way off the porch.

“Don't forget,” she called after him, “we're going over to your aunt Molly's place in an hour.”

“Okay!” he said, making a bee-line for the small cistern pond that caught runoff from the roof.

“Look at him,” she said quietly as soon as he was out of earshot.

“What...”

She nudged her husband. “Just watch. We don't do enough of that. Some day, he'll be grown and...” She let the sentence drop.

They'd discussed it many times. Her own parents had not been there to watch her grow up and she'd be damned if she was going to repeat that with her own child.

Leif put his arms around her and together, they watched their son as he played. The boy had always exhibited a powerful fascination with water. His preference for water was so strong, that several people had suggested that he might be a merman. While those statements had always been made somewhat in jest, Charlie hadn't been able to shake the feeling that there'd been something else behind them.

“What's on your agenda today?” Leif asked. “The usual?”

“Yup.” The usual was always one or more of the pyro-arts. Glass, ceramic, smithing, welding, she did it all. And there was always something under that purview that needed doing. “Gotta pitch-seal the Johnsons' rain barrels after our brunch with the Bakers.” Going unspoken was that Charlie would do the grilling, as always.

Charlie watched, and in the morning sunlight cresting over the hills, young Andrew reached his hand out over the water. The surface shifted, then bulged upward, a grapefruit-sized sphere of it detaching to hang blobbily in mid-air just below Andrew's palm.

She gasped. Leif let out a low whistle.

“Our son...has hydrokinesis,” she said slowly. She'd long wondered if she'd pass on anything to a child the way her own parents had passed strange abilities on to her. She rested a hand absently on her slightly bulging belly and wondered about that one, too.

And she realized she could see her father in her son. More than just being his grandfather's namesake, the one lived on in the other.


End file.
